“If I didn’t believe in peace, I wouldn’t carry a camera on my shoulder”: Jesús Abad Colorado, photojournalist

Despite the fact that Jesús Abad Colorado has spent three decades portraying the faces of war victims: peasants separated from their towns, murdered children, cremated bodies and thousands of other images of the worst horrors that violence has left behind in Colombia, the hope of that your country achieves peace is intact.

What’s more, he confessed to the voice of america that “if I didn’t believe that peace is possible, I wouldn’t continue working with a camera on my shoulder.”

Abad grew up in a peasant family that suffered from violence and, when he began touring the country in 1992, although he did not experience it firsthand, he began to encounter similar stories that surrounded him from a young age: a displaced father, a worker, worker of the National University; the death of his relatives, the disappearance of a cousin, by the army. Facts that made him understand that, as he affirms, his “job in journalism was to tell the story of simple people, who are the ones who always end up losing in all forms of violence.”

He says that, since he was in high school, he decided to be a journalist. Later, when he studied at the University of Antioquia, he was marked by the streak of violence that the country was experiencing against alternative sectors and, although at first he thought of writing, in 1987, “he hid his hand and sharpened his eye”, when deciding who wanted to be a photojournalist.

Each image, a meaning

In Abad’s life there are very significant, terrifying and even hopeful moments. Remember, for example, the killing of children by the army and paramilitaries, in the community of Paz de San José de Apartado, in 2005, or the dismembered bodies, others cremated, that were left after the guerrillas dynamited the oil pipeline in Segovia, Antioquia, in 1998.

The image of a mutilated Christ, taken in the church where he saw the bodies dismembered by a bomb thrown by the FARCin Boyacá, on May 2, 2002, or the face of the girl from commune 13, in Medellín, Angi Marín, looking through the hole left by a bullet, may be the most famous, but he affirms that the value of the image “is not determined by the volume of deaths that one grooms, but sometimes by what the death of a leader, of a teacher meant for a people.”

And this is how, among the moments that have marked her life the most, she remembers the portrait she captured of an indigenous woman, whom she remembers by name and surname, and who, in her hand, holds an ID-size photo of her husband, that he was a teacher and the leader and rector of a school, in a town between Antioquia and Panama, in the Chocó area and who was murdered three years ago by paramilitary groups that sought to silence him.

“It is a way of saying that behind a photograph there is always an important story that the country should know, and should not only feel solidarity or empathy with these peoples, but also help solve all these problems that violence leaves us,” points out the 55-year-old photojournalist, born in Medellín.

Hope, in the midst of horror

The photojournalist also tells how violence has also persecuted him, to have been threatened with weapons on his back or his head, being kidnapped twice, once by the FARC, another by the ELN, or from the multiple falls he has suffered and which have left him with a few broken tendons.

When asked if he has ever thought about quitting his job, he says yes, but that he still has the responsibility on his shoulders to work for the next generations and the less fortunate.

Although the Colombian journalist answers questions with an airy tone of melancholy, there is always hope in his voice. He says that he has felt “the smell and the pain of what war is in a country, where the peasants have always lost it”, which “shakes” him to “constantly be talking about the importance of peace.” .

And it is that, for him, peace is a collective construction and it is achieved if the ruling, political, business and academic classes understand that this is not done in large cities, but that “it must be worked on and built so that the people can live it.” peasants”, the black and indigenous peoples.

But he is also harshly critical of arms manufacturers who, he says, are in the business of war. To achieve peace, more than the confluence of the different powers in Colombia is needed, he adds, but from other countries. “Those machine guns, from those arms factories in the United States, which are sometimes freely sold to anyone, end up in the hands of the guerrillas, a paramilitary group, or any criminal group in Colombia or throughout Latin America.”

The memory of the conflict

Jesus does not define himself as a war reporter. He has not even wanted to document conflicts in other countries. He defines himself as “a journalist who has always put his eye, his heart and his conscience on the same axis. I am not going to look for the toughest face of the war… I am looking for faces that question this country”.

In this way, although there are several journalists who have recorded the violence in Colombia, Abad has not only traveled the regions, but has also decided to record part of his work to reconstruct and save the historical memory of a conflict through ‘The witness’a work that was born as a documentary made for snail televisionny then went to the Netflix platform, and a photographic exhibition -since 2018- of around 500 images that recently became a collection of four books that include 700 images and texts from other witnesses of this long conflict.

This collection, curated by María Belén Sáez de Ibarra and produced under the seal of the National University of Colombia, seeks to be “a pedagogical tool to generate dialogues in classrooms, in homes, in friends’ patches.” The work includes not only photographs or chronicles of the author, but the voice of seven guests who participate in interviews written in the first person, including the current defense minister, Iván Velásquez Gómez, as well as writings by well-known chroniclers.

“These books come out because they are the exhibition with wings and they will reach many parts of the country… They are books to generate reflection in a country that needs to see itself there, with all those portraits. Understanding that the people who are there are not anonymous beings and that, through this journalistic work… there are also many portraits that speak to us of humanity,” says Abad, referring to missionaries from different parts of the country, human rights defenders , like even the Vice President of Colombia, Francia Márquez.

For now, Jesús confesses that he continues to dream of “walking this country much more, but to see the people living in peace”, with continuing to portray starry skies -another of his passions-, planting the land and reading “not only books, but read the territories”.

“I would love to be able to live and say that I worked to help build peace in a country. And that I did it by taking photographs, which are not taken with the tip of a finger, because photographs are pulsations of the soul,” he points out.

Abad has been the winner of the Simón Bolívar National Journalism Award, the National Photography Award, the Caritas International Awards in Switzerland, the Freedom of Expression Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists in the United States, and the Recognition of Excellence of the Gabo Award 2019, among other recognitions.

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